There is lots of support for families at Microsoft. As with many large corporations, the support of women and promotion to leadership varies by group. Some managers and teams really get it and have made changes. Others have not. Yet. I believe Satya Nadella is working hard to make necessary changes.

Job Satisfaction Level

4.0

Recent Salary (USD)>$150k

Recent Bonus (USD)$20k-$50k

Took Maternity Leave Here? (Weeks)16 paid / 8 unpaid

Are Women and Men Treated Equally?Not for Promotion, Hiring, Evaluation and Reviews

Family Friendly AspectsHours, Culture, Policies

Recommend to Women?
Yes

One Thing Employer Could ImproveWe need to promote more women into leadership, but we also need more unconscious bias training for male managers who lead mixed teams to make sure women in engineering and program management roles feel supported.

The company can still be doing so much more for women... You won't encounter any blatant sexism but the culture is still very much all about 'the guys' at the top and being part of each department's boy's club.

Job Satisfaction Level

4.0

Recent Salary (USD)$100k-$150k

Recent Bonus (USD)$0-$10k

Took Maternity Leave Here? (Weeks)None taken

The company added paternity leave rights and extended maternity leave last year, though only in the U.S.

Are Women and Men Treated Equally?Not for Promotion, Evaluation and Reviews

Family Friendly AspectsHours, Culture

Recommend to Women?
The company offers a lot of great experience opportunities but is still very much old-school corporate America when it comes to women (and diversity in general). It's trying to change its culture and has a few interesting initiatives for women, but in my opinion it's still far from being enough.

One Thing Employer Could ImprovePromote more women into leadership positions

Choose your manager very, very carefully. Research by searching out other women who work in that group and ask to sit down and have a private chat outside of theory office.

Job Satisfaction Level

4.0

Recent Salary (USD)$100k-$150k

Recent Bonus (USD)$20k-$50k

Took Maternity Leave Here? (Weeks)8 paid / 4 unpaid

Recently expanded, very generous. However, depending on your role, taking that time can result in a noticeable penalty to upward mobility. Hourly pressures in Services make it particularly difficult to take this time away without a hit on your career

Are Women and Men Treated Equally?Yes

Family Friendly AspectsHours, Policies

Recommend to Women?
There is a big difference in experiences depending on whether you are highly technical. If you are doing technical work in services or coding in a Product Group, there are the usual challenges with getting recognition, bonuses, etc. On the other hand, excellent benefits, the company tries hard to address these problems. No worse, so far as I can tell, than other IT industry companies.

One Thing Employer Could ImprovePromote more women into leadership positions

If you join, build up a network of supportive female professionals. Don't trust HR. Don't fill out polls or surveys. Just do your job unbelievably well, and you will slowly rise to a point When it is time to move on because you hit the glass ceiling, do that. Try moving around every two to three years to resist "tracking" and growing stale. It can be hard to move around, but with determination you can usually pull it off.

Job Satisfaction Level

3.0

Recent Salary (USD)$100k-$150k

Recent Bonus (USD)$20k-$50k

Took Maternity Leave Here? (Weeks)None taken

That was a long time ago I took maternity leave. Today Microsoft has one of the best, considerably extended, maternity leaves in the industry. They also now encourage men to take paternal leave, which I've noticed is really changing the attitude among men towards the time away--they appreciate it and judge women less harshly for taking time away. I had great managers and no consequences for leaving for maternity leave, but I now hear varying stories from the women. My theory is this is mostly due to crushing metrics coming in over the past six years. Stepping away for this leave seems to inevitably lead to reviews (for both men and women) that complain about your "lack of impact" and the sudden rise of vague statements about how you are falling short, but in ways where you cannot figure out how to correct the perceived problem.

Are Women and Men Treated Equally?Not for Pay, Promotion, Hiring, Evaluation and Reviews

Family Friendly AspectsPolicies

Recommend to Women?
It depends. Microsoft has good benefits for women, and can be relatively family friendly, but only in narrow roles where women are traditionally in the majority, such as in HR, marketing, etc. If you are a young woman with technical qualifications and no family, it is a wonderful place to get started, with interesting and challenging projects. But when it comes to promoting engineers, older women with families have a hard time rising. Seeing this, 2-5 years down the road, the younger female engineers tend to walk out as a result, or move to much "softer" roles. Women are very poorly represented in the upper reaches of Product Groups and especially in certain areas of the Services (field facing, customer facing) branches. Metrics rule, except when it comes to measuring the more embarrassing aspects, such as the technical numbers and their spread in various groups. Those metrics are also often brutal towards women, ignoring the impact of often useless or nonsensical travel, celebrating high numbers of hours over great work, brushing past the limits of extending work into personal lives, and passing over the particular challenges that female engineers have in the IT Industry. D&I initiatives are driven by HR with very little understanding of these differences in women's experiences across the company, and ironically tend to lead to confirming instead of countering the worst views of women: weak, incompetent, just not ready to perform. At its best, Microsoft is a wonderful place for women to work--for a time. Male peers are usually good to great to work with, but management seems afraid of women and over-controls through HR, putting women in boxes they cannot get out of easily, and failing to be fully accountable for slow progress at the top tiers. At its worst, Microsoft is very, very tough, but probably no worse than anywhere else in the IT Industry.

One Thing Employer Could ImprovePromote more women into leadership positions